Tag: paul graham

Wisdom patterns #1: OBSESSIONS WIN

Like the giant nerd I am, I have been trying to find the shared patterns and common principles among the many quotes and excerpts I’ve collected. I’ve managed to create a list of 20 or so, so called wisdom patterns, and I’ll steadily share them here when I’m feeling inspired to write which is not often.

Starting with what I consider the most powerful pattern, which summates to something like “Obsessions win”.

Alternate names I had for this pattern include “Go very deep” and “the power of focus”.

All quotes below are taken verbatim, all mistakes mine.

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Wisdom principle #1 — OBSESSIONS WIN:

One thing that distinguishes the persistent is their energy. At the risk of putting too much weight on words, they persist rather than merely resisting. They keep trying things. Which means the persistent must also be imaginative. To keep trying things, you have to keep thinking of things to try. – Paul Graham

Van Gogh didn’t say: Thats just an old chair. He looked, and looked, and looked. He sensed the Beingness of the chair. Then he sat in front of the canvas and took up the brush. – Eckhart Tolle

“It’s tough to be good at something you’re not interested in. It’s nearly impossible to be great at something you’re not obsessed with.” – Shane Parrish

that money and time are the heaviest burthens of life, and that the unhappiest of all mortals are those who have more of either than they know how to use. – Samuel Johnson

For Nietzsche, the Übermensch is a being who is able to completely affirm life: someone who says ‘yes’ to everything that comes their way; a being who is able to be their own determiner of value; sculpt their characteristics and circumstances into a beautiful, empowered, ecstatic whole; and fulfill their ultimate potential to become who they truly are.

“Trust your obsessions. […] You don’t always use your obsessions. Sometimes you stick them onto the compost heap in the back of your head, where the rot down, and attach to other things, and get half-forgotten, and will, one day, turn into something completely usable. Go where your obsessions take you. … Your obsessions may not always take you to commercial places, or apparently commercial places. But trust them.” — Neil Gaiman

A single-minded devotion to an idea can spur massive change (but this type of fanatical devotion can also backfire)

TS Eliot observed that “only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”

We are strongly biased towards people who are so determined to succeed that they never give up, never quit. — pmarca

The most successful people i know didn’t work the hardest. They took the most risk. – @howard

Here’s how to live: Commit. – Derek Sivers

You can become the world’s best in something primarily by caring more about it than anyone else. – Kevin Kelly

Give yourself a lot of shots to get lucky’ is even better advice than it appears on the surface. Luck isn’t an independent variable but increases super-linearly with more surface area—you meet more people, make more connections between new ideas, learn patterns, etc. – Sam Altman

There are arguments that go in both ways but I’d say yes: it’s beneficial to build an obsession and compulsion with things you want to be better at. Especially if that thing is hard to do because you can overcome the difficulty with brute force

To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, “I am listening to this music,” you are not listening. To understand joy or fear, you must be wholly and undividedly aware of it. So long as you are calling it names and saying, “I am happy,” or “I am afraid,” you are not being aware of it. – Alan Watts

When you let your mind wander, it wanders to whatever you care about most at that moment. So avoid the kind of distraction that pushes your work out of the top spot, or you’ll waste this valuable type of thinking on the distraction instead. (Exception: Don’t avoid love.) – PG

But when we are at our best, we’re not slogging through. Great people are obsessed and they’re not slogging through either. They are driven. They are motivated. They are deeply, deeply engaged

Once you make a decision, go all in.
Commit fully to your choices. Half-hearted efforts yield half-hearted results.
Indecision only leads to stagnation and missed opportunities.
Stay committed to your goals, even when faced with obstacles and setbacks. Perseverance is single-handedly the most important key to achieving a goals.
-Anil Lulla

“Peter Thiel used to insist at PayPal that every single person could only do exactly one thing. And we all rebelled. You feel like it’s insulting to be asked to do just one thing.
But Peter would enforce this pretty strictly. He’d basically say: ‘I will not talk to you about anything else except for this one thing that I’ve assigned to you. I don’t want to hear about how great you’re doing in this other area. Just focus until you conquer this one problem.’…
The insight behind this is that most people will solve problems that they understand how to solve. Roughly speaking, they will solve B+ problems instead of A+ problems. A+ problems are high-impact problems for your company but they’re difficult–you don’t wake up in the morning with a solution to them, so you tend to procrastinate…
If you have a company that’s always solving B+ problems, you’ll never create the breakthrough idea because no one is spending 100% of their time banging their head against the wall every day until they solve it” – Keith Rabois

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. – TS Eliot

Seinfeld: I’m never not working on material. Every second of my existence, I’m thinking, could I do something with that?
Howard Stern: That, to me, sounds torturous.
Seinfeld: Your blessing in life is when you find the torture you’re comfortable with

“Life punishes a vague wish and rewards a specific ask.” – Tim Ferriss

But the artist cannot look to others to validate his efforts or his calling. If you don’t believe me, ask Van Gogh, who produced masterpiece after masterpiece and never found a buyer in his whole life.

And in that flow, you find yourself doing things not purely for status, but because there’s something in them that’s more meaningful to you. As I’ve written before: “To become truly great at something, you need to be at least a little obsessed with that thing — enough to get lost in the joy of doing it, not the allure of what it could get you.” – Anu Atluru

I see a lot of people with talent but the one thing they don’t have is that just love of doing it for the sake of it. — Rodney Mullen

Since I was 13, there probably hasn’t been a single hour that’s gone by that I’ve been awake where I haven’t thought about YouTube – Mr. Beast

I knew from the age of 13 that this is what I was gonna do until the day I died – Mr. Beast

Obsessions tend to win. Whether sports, a startup, a community, or a movement. Those who are obsessed will almost always, with enough time, beat those who are not

Find what you love and let it kill you – Bukowski

The only thing that will make you happy is to set a goal, then kill yourself to achieve it. I have a theory that the elation you feel is directly proportional to the sacrifices you make. – Dr. Nicholas of Broadcom

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Next wisdom pattern will be “Do it now.”

Excerpts from “Acceleration of Addictiveness” by Paul Graham (adding to Personal Bible)

Going into my bible.

Source here: https://paulgraham.com/addiction.html

All below are copied verbatim:

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Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that seems strictly better. When progress concentrates something we don’t want to want — when it transforms opium into heroin — it seems bad. But it’s the same process at work

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Food has been transformed by a combination of factory farming and innovations in food processing into something with way more immediate bang for the buck, and you can see the results in any town in America. Checkers and solitaire have been replaced by World of Warcraft and FarmVille. TV has become much more engaging, and even so it can’t compete with Facebook

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Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don’t think you’re weird, you’re living badly.

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As knowledge spread about the dangers of smoking, customs changed. In the last 20 years, smoking has been transformed from something that seemed totally normal into a rather seedy habit: from something movie stars did in publicity shots to something small huddles of addicts do outside the doors of office buildings

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We’ll have to worry not just about new things, but also about existing things becoming more addictive. That’s what bit me. I’ve avoided most addictions, but the Internet got me because it became addictive while I was using it

PG on what startup founders need to unlearn from schooling (an oldie but goodie)

Why did founders tie themselves in knots doing the wrong things when the answer was right in front of them? Because that was what they’d been trained to do. Their education had taught them that the way to win was to hack the test. And without even telling them they were being trained to do this. […] That’s why the conversation would always start with how to raise money, because that read as the test. It came at the end of YC. It had numbers attached to it, and higher numbers seemed to be better. It must be the test

And

In practice, the freakishly specific nature of the stuff ambitious kids have to do in high school is directly proportionate to the hackability of college admissions. The classes you don’t care about that are mostly memorization, the random “extracurricular activities” you have to participate in to show you’re “well-rounded,” the standardized tests as artificial as chess, the “essay” you have to write that’s presumably meant to hit some very specific target, but you’re not told what

Source: http://www.paulgraham.com/lesson.html?viewfullsite=1

Five articles to recommend: Diamonds, Surveilled cities, Zero to One, PG, and Kevin Kelly’s countdown clock

Have you ever tried to sell a diamond? [The Atlantic]

Since “young men buy over 90% of all engagement rings” it would be crucial to inculcate in them the idea that diamonds were a gift of love: the larger and finer the diamond, the greater the expression of love. Similarly, young women had to be encouraged to view diamonds as an integral part of any romantic courtship

The most surveilled cities in the world [Statista]

The Chinese city of Taiyuan, located in the Shanxi province roughly 300 miles Southwest of Beijing, tops the list with 120 public CCTV cameras per 1,000 inhabitants. The highest-ranked non-Chinese city is London, also notorious for its strict surveillance of public spaces, with 67 cameras per 1,000 people, with Los Angeles the highest-ranked U.S. city in the ranking with 6 cameras per 1,000 inhabitants

What makes Zero to One a masterpiece? [Ellen Fishbein]

A great company: a conspiracy to change the world.
(A company’s) secret: a specific reason for success that other people don’t see.

Early Work [PG]

But even if Silicon Valley’s encouraging attitude is rooted in self-interest, it has over time actually grown into a sort of benevolence.

My Life Countdown [Kevin Kellyy]

My friend Stewart Brand, who is now 69, has been arranging his life in blocks of 5 years. Five years is what he says any project worth doing will take. From moment of inception to the last good-riddance, a book, a campaign, a new job, a start-up will take 5 years to play through. So, he asks himself, how many 5 years do I have left? He can count them on one hand even if he is lucky. So this clarifies his choices. If he has less than 5 big things he can do, what will they be?

Genius: A self-interested obsession that happens to be useful or important

That’s my one-line takeaway from PG’s essay, The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius.

A few excerpts below:

Which leads us to the second feature of this kind of obsession: there is no point. A bus ticket collector’s love is disinterested. They’re not doing it to impress us or to make themselves rich, but for its own sake.

An obsessive interest in a topic is both a proxy for ability and a substitute for determination. Unless you have sufficient mathematical aptitude, you won’t find series interesting. And when you’re obsessively interested in something, you don’t need as much determination: you don’t need to push yourself as hard when curiosity is pulling you.

So what matters? You can never be sure. It’s precisely because no one can tell in advance which paths are promising that you can discover new ideas by working on what you’re interested in.

Even Newton occasionally sensed the degree of his obsessiveness. After computing pi to 15 digits, he wrote in a letter to a friend: I am ashamed to tell you to how many figures I carried these computations, having no other business at the time.